Chikiss

New Season

Years ago, while on tour in Finland, Russian singer and musician Galina Ozeran lost her voice entirely for a full month. Initially she was devastated: she felt “like a zero, a ghost,” and stopped leaving the house. But gradually the enforced silence instilled her with a zen-like calm, “absolutely empty and weightless.” The experience inspired her to explore a more muted and shadowy form of electronic song-craft using only breath and synthesizers, evoking “the condition of a ghost.” New Season emerged from hermetic home sessions in St. Petersburg and Berlin across the past several years, composed in a mode of “free abstract deep fantasy.” The album’s ten songs swim through lulling nocturnal pools of cosmic drift, hallucinatory pulse, and sensual whisper, alternately emotive and elusive. Satellite ballads and solaris pop weave in and out of woozy spectral ambience, echoing her belief that “music comes from the subconscious, from sensations of the moment.” A veiled but vivid collection of inner space electronics and lucid dream melody by one of the east’s evolving talents. Mastered by Alex Nagle. Design by Britt Brown.